


Fire in the Sky

by unremarkable_house



Category: Better Call Saul (TV)
Genre: Post Episode: s05e06 Wexler v. Goodman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-07-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:41:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25494784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unremarkable_house/pseuds/unremarkable_house
Summary: Angsty post-ep for Wexler v. Goodman
Relationships: Jimmy McGill | Saul Goodman/Kim Wexler
Comments: 18
Kudos: 44





	Fire in the Sky

In an attempt to staunch the rising tide of panic, the only thing Jimmy can think to say is, “Okay.” 

“Okay.” _What?_  
“Okay.” _Wait._

Ideally-- “Okay.” _I acknowledge what you said and now I must interpret its meaning._

But mostly, “Okay.” _Please shut up and give me a chance to change your mind._

This was usually a foolproof tactic for Jimmy McGill, provided he could come up with a witty or disarming enough retort to stop Kim Wexler from continuing down this dangerous path to becoming his ex, again. Or from backflipping across a pit of alligators and strong-arming her way into becoming his third bride. Neither option seemed logical or emotionally viable at the moment. Kim’s expression, at first naked and helpless, is quickly masked by a custodial bitterness.

But when one is caught in a deluge there is no time for navel-gazing and the woman in black who stands before him wants to play roulette with a loaded gun. Jimmy McGill has found himself trapped on a levee about to burst and wash him away. It is time to sink or swim.

A snatch of music plays ominously in his head: _smoke on the water, fire in the sky._

Kim’s gaze is now unwavering upon him. A fully hardened shell. A familiar look. This is the same look she uses on judges and rival prosecutors and disobedient clients, on pushy yuppies with fat wallets and hot marks. On recalcitrant partners and unruly lovers. 

The look of a person who plays to win. _Who’s the sucker now, Jimmy?_

“Okay?” Kim presses on with a cutting edge to her voice, absolute in her rationale. He hasn’t heard the whole argument but the verdict is in. Considering she just proposed marriage to the man who spent the last ten years chasing after her with a mail cart and a bruised Esteem and a ten-year-long courtship disguised as a business arrangement, Kim seems quite disappointed with his reaction. Truly this was par for a course where saying Yes to being law partners was better than I Love You. Why could he not muster more than paralyzed betrayal? Furthermore, wasn’t she the most recently betrayed? 

But this Jimmy, the Jimmy that woke up this morning and lit the fuse that nearly annihilated every effort to capture Kim Wexler’s affection, good graces, and enterprise, has just entered the tilt-a-whirl that dips and dives him between his greatest wish and his greatest nightmare. Marry her or lose her? Impersonal solutions for an impertinent problem. 

For here stands his classic, all-business Kim Wexler: a cold, fierce set in her shoulders, a feral and challenging look in her eye. It’s not like she has never gotten angry before, she doled out penance with a sharp tongue and punishing disregard. _Fuck-you-Jimmy_ still crackles like electricity through the apartment and sets his arm hair on end. She once didn’t talk to him for ninety-nine days. He still couldn't listen to South Pacific without feeling blue. She never even asked him to move in, just made some space for him in the closet, stopped asking him to leave, and started saying sweet things at the end of the day like _let's go home._

Behind her, the door serves as a gaping reminder of this precious tether.

Taking his silence unfavorably, Kim presses on with a list of reasons why they should be wed so factual and logical he has to wonder if this is an argument she has rehearsed before or if, in his patented fashion, she wishes to be saved by pure instinct alone. It's her drive to survive; in the face of her pure contempt for losing, she litigates. At least it's nice to know that she’d rather not break up with him, despite the Hobson’s choice. 

But Kim’s soft spot for him was historically a mile wide, which left plenty of room to sneak back in under the fence. _Fuck-me-Jimmy;_ it wasn’t odd to find her sniffing around his door from time to time either. On the one-hundredth day, he found her waiting outside the day spa with tickets for a double feature and purse full of candy bars and nips. They both knew all too well that starting over was a real boner killer. _Sink or sunk?_

So here they are, two animals in a cage fighting over the last bowl of food, the last that remains of their investment. For an instant, he is shocked that for all the two-bit wedding proposals and marriages he’s ever participated in, this one would be the most reckless. And his second wife had taken a tire iron to the passenger side window of his Chevy over an engagement ring pawn job gone wrong. 

Yet it was his favorite person, his longest relationship, that had him up against the wall with a gun to his head. And so sad to think that right before she walked through the door he had thought that serving her Kevin Wachtell’s bare genitals on a silver platter would be cause for a celebration that would make the St. Clair family proud. _Let’s party like the nouveau riche_ , she had said once. _The only wealth a Wexler could ever imagine_. 

But he can’t think of a time in all the years he’s known her, all the indiscretion through which they’ve waded, where Kim Wexler would have ever seriously weighed the pros and cons of marrying a man who once had to explain what a Chicago Sunroof was. Who proudly got fired from the best job he ever had with a set of bagpipes and more filthy toilet tricks. Who gleefully committed mail fraud -- any fraud, at least for a good enough reason.

It wasn’t the angriest he had ever seen her, but it was close.

He didn’t have a choice, he knew. Jimmy could never not give her what she wanted, what he thought she deserved, whether it was a good idea or a bad one. Even if it did feel pathetically reasonable to realize that the best reason the love of his life could come up with for marrying him was “legal reasons”. And that whatever terrible idea it was for Kim to marry Jimmy, this was the best offer he’s ever gotten, would probably ever get. Just one last way to really make sure she got screwed for knowing him. Next time she wanted to be rid of him, it was going to cost a pretty penny. 

Perhaps this is what he gets in return for all the times he literally and metaphorically left her standing helplessly in a hallway in order for all his chips to fall neatly into place: full-on, mutually assured self-destruction. Revenge, served freezing cold. 

In a law office basement, she had once said: _You don’t save me. I save me_. But now he had to watch her choose to walk off a cliff and be fully complicit. With him. She might as well have said: _I'll make sure you can never save me._ The room was warm but her eyes were ice blue. 

_Beggars can’t be choosers_ , he supposes. He tried to give her the gift of uninhibited ethical dominance and this was his just rewards. Reparations for Olivia Bitsui? It was a good idea!

“It’s a good idea,” she’s saying, looking for all the world like someone who should be saying the exact opposite. It was surreal to watch her speak, to hear her say these impossible things. 

“Ironclad defense. No more gray zone. Then whatever is between us--" her hands, eager for a voice in the argument, motion between the two of them "--can stay where it belongs.” He anticipates that the “thing” she wishes to nameless would find a home just as, if not more so, anonymous in their potential union than it was right now. Kim wanted to long jump right into marriage without ever having to say I Love You, wanted to pack it all into I Do. 

It’s been ten years but it’s suddenly happening way too fast.

Jimmy nods mutely, gently, in a deescalating manner, as one would when dealing with a rabid animal. As titillating as the idea of marrying Kim would be on any other day when it was just a daydream accompanied by three different kinds of take-out, the AC on blast, and a movie marathon in a small living room with the blinds drawn, or when he played his cards just right and she would press him against a bookshelf and speak using only her body -- today, the aggressive tilt of her hips fill his belly with a cold pit of fear. Fear of losing her. 

Fear of having her. 

He wonders who is the most wild, who is pinning whom down. Maybe it’s him thrashing against his restraints, maybe Slippin’ Jimmy will always just be the black mold that creeps in under the cornice. She was going to write a check to Mr. Acker from her own damn savings account to make up for the sins of her employer. Kim dreamed of being a _pro bono_ Bono. Yet, maybe she is the terrorist, holding the law hostage, holding their relationship hostage from day one. He wants to hold out his hands to her and say: calm down, I won’t hurt you. But he knows that would be a grave lie. 

_Do or die._ Jimmy had so few belongings, he could be out of her life with just one trip in his Esteem. He never did stop paying rent to Mrs. Nyugen because he never did officially move in with Kim.

Kim suddenly brushes past him into the kitchen, picks up her wine glass on the way, and downs it’s contents in one gulp. She pours another one for herself and then one for him, nearly emptying the bottle with her alarming portions. 

When she presses the glass into his hand, her fingers brush his and he becomes frozen in place. _A third wife_ , he thinks dimly, their hands clasped around the wineglass filled way too full. He thinks of champagne flutes and wedding cakes and frilly white dresses and rice suspended in mid-air. He thinks of these things instead of the rebuttal he doesn’t want to find. Things like: _you deserve better than a man who is all too eager with a powderkeg._

He absolutely could not stop himself from playing his Mesa Verde commercial. He barely tried.

_Tick, tick, boom._

“Jimmy,” Kim says sharply, regaining his attention and rewarding him with a disarmingly affectionate smile. As a lawyer, she knows how to support her evidence with just the right body language. Now she uses the same smile that hearkens him back to the sweet and incorruptible way she used to look at him from across the break room, over stacks of inscrutable LSAT study guides, with a shadow sliced across her face, under the covers with all the brothers and bosses and other young lawyers scrambling over each other for a piece of the pie put away for the day. There was a time, after all, when Kim Wexler hung the moon and hung it good. 

He volleys a small, stilted smile and looks back at this woman who he knows he loves partly because she is his soft, best friend who watches movies with her bare feet in his lap; partly because she strides through life next to him, staid in the colors of night, étude in blue, while he discos across a rainbow; and partly because her wit and aspirations were an alluring bait.

Hook, line, and sinker he fell for her before he even had two feet in Albuquerque. She was some sort of rare, scholarly siren spouting off supreme court decisions and reciting complicated law jargon, washed ashore the monotonous hellscape of the mailroom. Kim looked so good when she spoke he wanted to memorize every word that fell from her lips. 

So down on his luck was he when he first arrived, so malleable to the whims of his new life, he had let himself get swept away by the urge to consume her so badly that he had to become her first. Kim walked into the law so followed, as best he could. When he found out she smoked cigarettes, he decided he should too, if only for an opportunity to stand beside her. When he couldn’t make a name for himself the way that she had, he made up a new one so he could try again.

Kim takes a good, hard look at her improbable protégé and sighs imperceptibly.

“Say yes,” she demands, not for the first time. Between them, the trace tightens and threatens to snap.

But if he said Yes, he would be guilty of doing wrong to her. As much as he loved her, he knew he wasn’t the kind of man to build a stable life around. If he said No, he would be guilty of doing wrong _by_ her, because life with Kim was a dance of how to please a woman that was never satisfied. Performed by a man who only pretended to know how to be loved. 

_His third wife._ He can see it clearly, can suddenly see the path to this moment so pristinely it’s almost perverse in its accomplishment. Every opportunity he had to beguile her into a deeper entanglement -- the infancy of their relationship spent eyeballing each other over a covertly shared cigarette, long nights racing each other to the bottom of a bottle, his slog through law school, the Hamlindigo blues, Viktor-with-a-K and Giselle St. Clair on Ice Station Zebra, Wexler McGill, ‘one after the Magna Carta’, even Saul-freaking-Goodman (how she hated him) -- and yet here she was: the first to offer to pound the golden spike into place. Or the final nail in the coffin. 

_Fish or cut bait._

“Yea,” he says through the lump in his throat. “Yes,” he says again, his voice warming to the idea. “Let’s tie the knot.” He winches out half of a grin.

Kim releases a breath so large that it depressurizes the room and finally smiles. 

She is still smiling a little when she clinks his glass and takes a long sip, her guileless eyes on his. The wine is bitter on his tongue but he drinks in sweet surrender, the storm that nearly busted their seams washing out to sea with cool, cleansing acceptance. She holds control firmly in her hands again and for a moment, saying Yes to her doesn’t feel bad at all. It feels amazing, actually. He's going to marry Kim Wexler and it was all her idea.

The color returns to her cheeks and she says:

“Do you have your social security card here?” Then she’s on the move, reaching into the back of a desk drawer where she pulls out the neat looking box from which she produces her documents. She tears off the top page of a scribbled on yellow legal pad, looks distractedly at it, considers crumpling it up and throwing it away, but instead just sets it aside. She writes down a few acceptable forms of identification and then the steps that will lead them towards the goal. It’s a short list, including things like _shower_ and _find jimmy’s birth certificate_ and _iron_. “Or are those things still at the salon?” she asks, distracted by her prepwork. 

All Jimmy can do is watch her, his brain too slow from the wine and the blunt force engagement to accurately calculate her intentions. He feels immensely stupid that he almost expected her to pick a date in June or July, send out invitations, taste cake. Of course she would want to elope. Of course she would want to elope _right now_ before she could change her mind. 

“I don’t have a passport, do you?” She looks to him expectantly, watching as he moves to pick up the paper that she cast aside.

“No,” he says, because for all their razor-sharp intellect, big ambitions, and thousands of dollars of education, neither Kim nor he had ever been anywhere other than where they were born and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Not counting the time he and Marco went to Sault Ste. Marie to buy bogus lotto tickets and magic mushrooms. You don’t need a passport to go nowhere. 

_Wexler McGill_ had had a sound that was almost too good not to say out loud. He had loved to roll it over his tongue like a decree, loved the way the W and the M had fit together like it was meant to be -- his pen carved it out with seven confident slashes. He loved her first name because it rhymed with his. Loved the texture of her last name: _Whex-Lerr_. That he still longed to put their name in lights was a well-known trope in their household, despite her perennial disinterest. She picked at her cuticles and he doodled their logo onto corners of legal notes and grocery lists. 

“Tomorrow?” He croaks. But he knows the negotiating portion of the evening has come to an end. Somewhere in her apartment is a small box that holds his meager belongings, including his social security card and birth certificate. He will produce his documents and he will go to the courthouse with Kim and he will sign an official record that will legally bind them together in matrimony. 

The same flirty glint in her eye that would tell him _She does indeed want another drink even though she said she doesn’t_ is present for a moment and he watches her plot out the next few hours on the legal pad, preceded by the tiniest seven-slashed squiggle to run the ink, and hopes that this isn’t the best moment of his life. He steps out behind her and onto the tightrope and it feels like another crack at a lifetime spent chasing after Kim Wexler.

“Tomorrow. We shouldn’t wait.” _It is this or nothing._

And then that’s that. _We are pleased to invite no one to the wedding of James and Kimberly, in twelve hours' time_. After which he knew she would probably head straight to Mesa Verde where she would attempt to untangle the mess he had made, again. Either that or just eviscerate them. 

And one thing had absolutely everything to do with the other. His body still pings with anxiety but he tries to copy her relaxed body language so she isn’t hip to his discomfort. He is about to marry his best friend. _Act like it_ , he tells himself.

She is still again, waiting. For Kim, the silence was only predatory if you thought yourself the prey. 

He would be remiss not to ask: “Are you sure--” but she cuts him off with the abrupt forward motion of her body bristling past him. It’s not what she wants to hear. She pulls a cigarette from her purse and steps out onto the balcony where she snaps noiselessly into relief with the flick of her lighter. 

Jimmy follows her outside because he really doesn’t have another choice. “Yea, sure,” he says. “I’m free tomorrow.” He feels featherless, completely bare to her. 

It’s not enough to just give her what she wants, he knows. Signing a legally binding contract and making her his wife might sound romantic, especially now as she assumes her familiar position next to him against the banister, a tendril of cigarette smoke trailing from her fingers to enwreathe her face. As much as he loves to pull her in step with him, this isn’t the same as the very sexy way she flirts with lawlessness. It’s not just a trip to Lubbock with thrift store crutches and a bag of skim milk. It’s not even Huell and a cleverly placed cell phone battery. If there is nothing more lawful than being wed, then why does this feel so illicit? 

He knows he must move very carefully if his wish is to keep from adding Kim Wexler to his list of exes. Jimmy suddenly has a distinct and terrible impression that if he goes through with this, he will be closer than ever to losing her. And it sounds a little bit like a wine glass shattering against the pavement.

Jimmy takes the cigarette from Kim’s fingers. “I’ve already been married twice. Are you sure you want to marry someone with such a bad track record? According to them, I’m a terrible husband. Fantastic lover -- ask our lawyers -- but a terrible husband.”

“Did you marry either of them for spousal privilege?”

“Not in the way you mean,” he says, trying for levity, thinking back to his very Catholic first wife. 

“Listen, Jimmy. All we have to do is go downtown, sign a few papers, and everything will be fixed. I just--” she grabs the cigarette back from him and takes a snappy drag, leaning forward, far over the banister as she exhales “--I just, I just can’t be your…” 

Turning to face him, she lets her hands once again express the things it’s always made her too uncomfortable to say. The cigarette smoke before her is massaged with motions that are supposed to mean “your girlfriend” but has never once been uttered out loud. 

“I just can’t be cut out anymore. I can’t be effective if I don’t know what’s going on. I’m sick of you torpedoing our relationship to eke out small victories in my name. I’m sick of you seeing me as a convenient mark for you can double-cross for profit and then kiss goodnight. You need me. You’ll need me on your side if this is the road you want to walk down. And then you can just, like, give me a fucking heads up before you want to get harebrained on me. Once I’m your wife, you can tell me everything. You can be honest with me. And we can’t get in trouble. This is a win-win.”

Typical Kim to postulate that anything less than marriage would be a failure. 

They both know she doesn’t need a very long list of reasons to convince him to marry her, but he lets her try anyway. All she would have to say is _marry me because I love you_ and he would. Then all of this will not have been for nothing. 

He must have a pained and faraway look on his face because she brings him back to her with his name, said in the reassuring way that always leaves him undone: “ _Jimmy_. Nothing has to change - We don’t need rings. I don’t need a dress. We’ll still be Kimberly Wexler and James Morgan McGill. We already live together, we already like each other! We just need to bring our IDs to the city hall first thing in the morning, sign a piece of paper, say I Do, and we can get on with our lives like normal.”

“Yea but two people _in like_ don’t marry each other.”

“Well, we do,” she mumbles, turning to lean back over the railing, cigarette dangling from her lips. 

He watches her smoke like he has countless times before. One short drag, one long drag, then she hands it to him. He could try to speak, poke holes in her argument, come up with some middle ground solution between getting hitched and breaking up, he reminds himself. Now would be the time, but he simply can’t find the words. All his stupid brain can tell him is that if he just plays his cards right, he can be married to Kim Wexler by lunchtime tomorrow. This time, when he tastes fear in his mouth, it’s the familiar fear of fucking things up again.

And if he's married to her, then maybe all of this will have been worth it. Every twisted path he's walked in her name, Sandpiper Crossing, 1-2-6-1 into 1-2-1-6, Rebecca bearing witness, twenty hours on a bus writing on postcards and fighting carsickness, Saul Goodman selling commercials and slinging burners and hosting meet-and-greets in the middle of the night. Craig and Betsy, Cliff, Irene, Chuck, Howard, Mr. Acker, Kevin. Every cross he bore to try and lift her up, to keep her close, to make her love him. He pictures her suddenly, standing starkly against the smoking embers of his brother's destroyed house, holding her broken arm tightly against her chest -- she had been oddly okay with all of that -- then when he hands her the results of his first bar exam, and then his second, and then finally his third...

 _Yes_ , he thinks, _it would be worth it._

“Witnesses!” He says suddenly, breaking the silence. “We will need two, right?”

“Right!” She exclaims, shifting back into the comfort of logistics. “Who?” 

“Paige?” He asks, but she scoffs, slouching over the railing as she knocks back another slug of her quickly disappearing wine. 

“After that stunt you pulled? The last thing I need is to explain to her or Kevin why I decided to turn around and marry you over it.” She takes another sip and rasps, “like it isn’t obvious.”

That gives him pause.

“For legal reasons,” he clarifies. Certainly not because every single action she’s ever taken has only been proof that she is inexorably entangled with him, agreeable to his questionable values, hot for his flexible morals. If only Paige and Kevin could go back in time eight years and find her drunk and giggling in the passenger seat of his car, sharing a doobie, and arguing about Nix v. Hedden. Catch them just two years ago in a dirty bar in Santa Fe drinking on a tab they didn’t intend to pay while he inched his hand up her skirt and read property listings from a Corrales real estate circular out loud. If they could have seen the look in her eyes then, well, they wouldn’t have to ask Why. 

“You’re right. Paige would probably be too jealous.” That earns him a blithe scoff and side-eye and he can’t help but grin a little. Anything to diffuse the tension in the air and in his gut. “What? I’ve seen the way she looks at you. _Oh, Kim_ \--” he says in a ridiculous, Paige-esque falsetto “-- _you’re so flawless and expedient!_ ”

She turns, resting that very same arm she once broke clean in two just to impress a couple of corporate schmucks on the railing and her amusement dims. “It's just a legal arrangement, Jimmy. They don’t even need to know.”

Viola, studiously working next to the fish tank while he munched on a bowl of cereal, had once uncharacteristically piped up when Kim had stepped out of the room to take a phone call and asked: _does Kim, like, date you?_

But Viola was out too. She apparently did not possess a rugged enough constitution to be a party to a legal commitment disguised as a shotgun wedding. Or was it a shotgun wedding disguised as a legal commitment? The lines were becoming blurred.

“Anyone else then?” But there isn’t anybody else. Every ally they might have once had in their corner is gone now. The twinge of loyalty he suddenly feels for her, his only friend in the world, begins to warm the cold fear still settled in his belly. No one would need to know because there was no one left but them. It was kind of romantic behind a certain filter. His need for her suddenly feels unquantifiable. He would do anything for her, cross any line for her, even his own. If he needed to jam a metaphorical ring on her finger to prove that, he would. And for the first time tonight, Jimmy feels all in. 

“Huell,” he chokes out, distracted by the intensity in her clear blue eyes. He has a familiar urge to put his hand on her neck and pull her towards him. He has the familiar urge to do something crazy so she would do it to him. “I’ll call Huell.” 

Jimmy leaves Kim on the balcony while he goes to find his cell phone. He watches her until she turns to watch him through the glass, so cool and collected, so different from the thundercloud of nerves firing through his system. But Huell is in, excited even, not remotely put out by the sudden request, even though Jimmy has to make it clear that paying a witness to appear would be extortion. Kim, buoyed by the news as she rinses her glass in the sink, heads to the bathroom to start getting ready for bed, plans in place. 

His other two wives had been cute and flighty and gullible. They believed him when he lied. They took everything he said at face value. Kim was nothing like them and did not believe him, not for a second. She believed _in_ him. Believed that whatever lie he needed to tell himself was justified. She believed it while she spent a week listening to him sing show tunes into her answering machine. She believed it as she watched the smoke from Chuck’s burning house fill the sky long after the fire was out. He shot her with finger guns and told her it was _S’all good, man!_ And she tried to believe it.

Or she didn’t at all. She truly was a fabulous liar too. 

He watches from the doorway of the bathroom while she brushes her teeth. When she is finished, he blocks her way out. 

“Kim, it's just that all these years I've seen you do verbal gymnastics to keep from having to call me anything other than your friend and even that you've choked on before. You’ve never called me your boyfriend and you very specifically went out of your way to avoid calling me your partner even though we established an LLC together. Now you want to jump from long term, live-in fuckbuddy straight to husband?”

She smiles softly and kindly puts her hand on the side of his face but says nothing. So he goes again. “Not that long ago, you told me you were done hearing about my extralegal affairs. Kim,” he pleads, “I need you to tell me what it is you really want.” She looks at him for a long moment and then tenderly rubs her finger across his cheekbone like a kiss. 

“I’ve never called you my fuckbuddy,” she says lightly, giving his cheek a gentle pat and then leaving him alone in the bathroom. 

And then from the bottom of her dresser as she pulls out her pajamas she says, “I changed my mind. I never want to be out of the loop again.” He watches her watch him seriously wearing an achingly familiar Bugs Bunny tee shirt. 

What she means is that she never wants to lose control again. In his mind’s eye, she’s holding out her hands and demanding that he pass it to her like a ceremonial torch. It wasn’t going to look like that to the rest of the world, they both knew that. His terrible reputation left sooty fingerprints over everything, her in particular. Marrying him would make Kim look weak. For some reason, that just makes him feel unbearably sentimental. 

“What will they say when you tell them you married Jimmy McGill?”

She smiles to herself, the first real smile of the night, either relishing the idea or maybe the amount of discomfort it was going to cause Kevin, Rich, and Howard in particular, but she declines to answer.

“What will they say when you tell them you married Kim Wexler?” That actually sounds so good he has to hide his grin. 

“I can see the headlines now: _Albuquerque's Best And Second Best Lawyer Take Vows_." He laughs and she laughs too.

“ _Area Couple Arbitrate Their Way Out From Between a Rock And a Hard Place,_ ” is what she says as she climbs into bed, suddenly looking exhausted. “At least we can get some rest tonight. I’m setting my alarm for five thirty. That will give us enough time to shower, find your documents, get breakfast, and be at City Hall by nine. Sounds good?” She stares at him expectantly from her bed, warm and tousled with the alarm clock in her hands like an explosive device, not at all acknowledging how he still stands so frozen in the doorway of the bathroom quietly accepting his decision to go for broke once more. All he can do is nod. 

She settles into the pillows as he fakes his way through a bedtime routine. When he looks at her, leafing through whatever pile of paperwork she left by her bed last night, he feels calm. She is the sunrise, a fire in the sky, and he never ever wants to look away from her. Because when Jimmy does look away, looks at how haunted and hunted his face is in the mirror, he feels like he has relinquished all control of that narrative. They have stepped off the hamster wheel and directly into the Thunderdome. And the winner takes it all.

The room is dark when he finally regains the nerve to climb into bed with her. 

Laying his head on the pillow next to hers, he finds her looking at him solemnly through the shadows. 

“Kim,” he whispers, his face and voice wracked with raw sincerity, “maybe we should just break up. Maybe you should get as far away from me as you can.” Sighing, she brushes a lock of hair from his forehead. Behind them, the clock ticks it’s way towards their reckoning. 

“Maybe we should,” she says sadly, lovingly. Though he wants to hear it, even scratching the surface draws blood. But her gaze is pure and untroubled. “And how long do you think that would last?”

It wouldn’t and they both knew it.

Kim closes her eyes and in her usual, exhausted manner drops quickly off. 

That night, for Kim, is spent soundly asleep, the troubles of the day put away until later. She has warred with enough foes, internal and external, to earn her rest. Her breath is steady. 

For Jimmy, the night is passed in wait, watching the sodium lights of the night shift and slant their way towards a cool pink dawn. 

He doesn’t think about Cicero or the failed marriages he left there. He doesn’t even think about his mother’s diamond engagement ring that he took from her safety deposit box shortly after she died, that Chuck would kill him if he knew he had. As if it even mattered what his dead brother thought about anything anyway. He didn’t even think about Chuck-- if what he wanted more was to gloat that Kim Wexler had chosen him after all or if it would make his brother proud to know his star associate had singled Jimmy McGill out of all the young professionals in Albuquerque as something special. He doesn't think about morning over the Sandias and he doesn't think of the crash. 

He doesn’t think about that bright morning when a resourceful first-year law student tapped his foot with hers under the table and drew his attention to Howard Hamlin’s boxers peeking out from behind his fly. Or when they got so drunk pretending to be pool sharks that he smashed the billiard light with his cue and when they got kicked out she just laughed and laughed and laughed. Or what a breathtakingly quick study she was in the art of trickery. He doesn't think about the hours they spent up on the crest watching the lights of Albuquerque twinkle below them while they sipped on warm longnecks and didn’t talk about the future. He doesn’t think about her face the first time he used his magic to make her problems go away or the first time he won a case or the first time she really let him touch her. When she really let him know her. He definitely doesn’t think about the second time she kissed him for the first time-- her idea, always her idea. 

Shortly before the alarm goes off, before the first bird sings from the parking lot, she rolls over and into his arms. In her sleep, she sighs and drowsily drapes herself across his body, her familiar weight like a thunder blanket against the turmoil within. He presses his lips to her hair, curls his fingers into her soft skin. She is real and whole and still hanging on to him above the abyss. 

Instead, he hums a familiar song.

_With a few red lights and a few old beds_  
_We make a place to sweat_  
_No matter what we get out of this_  
_I know we'll never forget_  
_Smoke on the water  
_ _Fire in the sky_


End file.
